After Parasite‘s eclipse over American audiences, I had a bit of a chuckle when people flocked to see Drive My Car the next year when it was nominated for Best Picture. It is, for sure, a fantastic film that deserved no less than its competitors at awards season. I also don’t mean to compare the next big Asian crossover to the one that took home the Big One, but Drive My Car is undoubtedly a Haruki Murakami film. Adapted from a story in the author’s short story collection Men Without Women, the film completely nails down the subterranean feeling of pain among other hurt people. But there is also a pronounced volume and precedence in the male voice, which is more or less the perspective of most of his works, and a sort of inexplicable bizarreness. Though Drive My Car and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (which originated from a story in The Elephant Vanishes) might feel unusual, they’re far from the weirdest. My partner, an avid fan of running-based memoirs, loved Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. We were both reading The New Yorker during the pandemic, so when I let her know that he was behind the fiction piece “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” in one of their issues, she paused and said, “Wait…that was the weirdest story I’ve ever read.”
There is valid criticism about Murakami’s work that could make the aftertaste unfeasible and negative opinions that I thought would adhere to. However, the consistency in which he depicts isolation on the blurred borders between reality and fantasy is such an establishment in his works that I have no choice but to stan the peculiarity that has pervaded his creativity for decades. Perhaps under a similar admiration, French director Pierre Földes takes Murakami’s collected works in measured hands for his animated adaptation Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Even though it’s named after the 2005 collection, the film’s primary bloodlines run after two stories (“UFO in Kushiro” and “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo”) in Murakami’s after the quake, which was written about the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Földes modernizes it to the earthquake in 2011, though the devastating aftereffects portrayed in this film might not feel as event-specific. One could make the argument of the nuclear meltdown playing a part into a couple of conversations (ie “Would you prefer a woman with six thumbs or four breasts?”) and the probability of a talking frog and an evil worm being slightly higher.
If some of this sounds familiar, it may be because Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume finally came to American theaters last month. Even with the same giant antagonist squirming underneath Tokyo streets, both animations couldn’t feel so further from each other. While Suzume easily wrecked me on a weekday afternoon, BWSW reflects a kind of casual despondency despite the country’s deadliest natural disaster occurring a few days ago. There are three main characters that are threaded into the film’s stories: Komura, Kyoko, and Katagiri.* Komura and Kyoko are married, but shortly after the earthquake, Kyoko leaves Komura, which diverges their pathes into heartbreak, introspection, and their shared lost cat named Watanabe. Katagiri, who works under Komura at a bank, finds a giant frog (voiced by Földes) in his apartment, who tells him that they need to work together to prevent another disaster from occurring.
As in most of Murakami’s stories, a large portion of character reveal occurs when the character shares a nondescript story that is often sexual in nature. In one scene, right before Komura is about to sleep with a co-worker’s younger sister’s friend Shimao, she recounts a time where she and her high school boyfriend were going to have sex in the woods but were worried about a bear attack, so they took turns ringing a bell to ward it off. Sometimes the conversations are inconclusive, which can be comical once you find yourself in the groove of Murakami’s absences of punchlines and clarity. In another story, Komura takes his teenage cousin to an ear appointment. When they discuss about his recurrent hearing issue, the cousin refers to John Wayne in Fort Apache: “If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren’t really there.” When Komura tries to clarify, the cousin replies, “Well, when somebody feels sorry for my ears, that dialogue always comes up to me” before repeating the quote again. Komura makes a thoughtful noise in response, which should ring as relatable to those who have found themselves listening to children lose their breath giving nonsensical diatribes about the color of apples.
For all the conversations about sex, expecting a climactic resolution in BWSW would render the film-watching experience unenjoyable. It also doesn’t mean that the film is pointless. For people who have a curiosity about human behavior or has wandered deeply in the crevices of our id, it should be an automatic win. Words from the original source are brought to the screen; while I’m not an audiobook person, sometimes hearing the words out loud has a different reverberation (on describing the worm, the Frog says, “With all the different kinds of hatred he has absorbed and stored inside himself over the years, his heart and body have swollen to gargantuan proportions,” which I realize is sort of an all-inclusive description of Murakami characters). On top and in between, Földes fills in the details of visual engagement. The captured motions remind me of Liu Jian’s Pulp Fiction-inspired Have a Nice Day (which also played at the Brattle a few years ago), where the focus is less on hyper details in action and more on the reflected experience of watching reactions and performances in communication. Several background characters are paled in white hues, as if they are ghosts trying to resume their normal routine (though knowing Murakami, they might as well be living people). In the end, a proper Murakami adaptation is moving — both in an emotional and off-putting sense. BWSW perfectly brings that to life.
* – The characters are depicted as Japanese but the voice cast mostly comprises of French actors speaking mostly American-accented English. Also worth sharing: “After filming live-action references for each and every shot, the animators would swap the actors’ heads for a 3D model of the character’s face, then trace over the outline in pencil and reanimate the facial expressions, coloring in the outline at the very end.”
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
2023
dir. Pierre Földes
105 min.
Playing Friday, 5/19 through Tuesday, 5/23 @ Brattle Theatre – click here for showtimes and ticket info
